Michael Weiss is the Research Director of The Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank, as well as the co-chair of its Russia Studies Centre. A native New Yorker, he has written widely on English and Russian literature, American culture, Soviet history and the Middle East. Follow @michaeldweiss

Another fake Syrian 'opposition' conference held in Damascus

As President Assad's military invaded Hama – arresting 25, killing 72, and shutting down communications in the city, which had turned out some 500,000 protesters – the strongman himself was busy putting on a play. Yet another shambolic "opposition" meeting took place last weekend, this one held at the Semiramis Hotel in Damascus.

Whatever the US State Department might tell you, it's absolutely no coincidence that the hotel is owned by Muhammad Deeb Daaboul, Hafez al-Assad’s former chief of staff, and Daaboul's son Salim. Billed as the “national initiative conference", the gathering was said to be the brainchild of an Islamist member of Syrian parliament called Mohammed Habash, who is a long-time friend of Assad.

The video below demonstrates the thoroughly Potemkin nature of these "dialogue" meetings:

Here's what you're watching. First a make-believe oppositionist called Zuhair al-Ghaloum begins regaling reporters of his patriotism. But his self-tribute is interrupted by louder chatter coming from the other side of the room where a genuine Syrian oppositionist, Majid Radwan Salha – he's also the imam of the Adra prison in northeast Damascus – says that the whole conference is a sham as it was only made possible because of so many fallen Syrians. If a “national initiative” wanted to honour their memories, Salha adds, it would call for the immediate end of the Assad regime.

People then begin chanting, “Allah, Syria, Bashar” and shuffle Salha out of the room, rather like that raped Libyan woman who tried to have a frank word with journalists in a Tripoli hotel months ago, before Gaddafi’s thugs spirited her away.

In a later interview, Salha explains that he only talked openly to the press to protest the dismissal of a colleague and that he’d seen first-hand the regime’s dirty work in the Damascene suburbs of Douma and Hasrata. If anything happens to him or to his family, he says, it’ll be at the hands of the state. Salha also declares his resignation from his chaplaincy at Adra prison.

Although the conference was approved by the vice-president's office, the management of the hotel where Sunday's conference was held initially refused to let participants in, prompting several to withdraw in protest. More than 200 people were invited to the meeting, but only about 40 attended.

“I am leaving because what is happening here does not serve Syria,” Hussein al-Ammash, former chief of the government's Commission for Fighting Unemployment, told the German Press Agency dpa.

“It seems some sides do not want Syrians to talk. They prevent us from holding the meeting after their promises for an alleged national dialogue,” al-Ammash said.

It's hard to expect a perestroika while the Great Terror is still going on.

New independent evidence of Assad's idea of reform has emerged with Amnesty International's report about atrocities in the city of Tell Kalakh. Every refugee that Amnesty interviewed in Lebanon said that he'd got at least one relative in detention back in Syria: "Those arrested included retired army officers, sheikhs, lawyers, carpenters, electricians, drivers, butchers, students, shopkeepers, farmers, painters, construction workers and hairdressers." One 20 year-old cited as "Mahmoud" did a month in Assad's dungeon. This is how the regime spoke with him:

The interrogator asked me if I was married. I said I wasn’t, so he said he was going to cut off my male organ. He beat me hard on my body until I fainted. I regained consciousness after water was splashed onto me, and without warning he applied an electric shock to my testicles. It was so terrible that I cannot describe it. I think I stayed five days at Military Security in Homs – each day the same story. They tied me up in the shabah position and applied electricity to my body and testicles. Sometimes I screamed very loudly and begged the interrogator to stop. He didn’t care. They made me put my thumb prints on documents I hadn’t read; I was blindfolded.

Syria is a country of 23 million people. The revolution has been going on for more than a quarter of a year now. How long before every Syrian has suffered in some way because of Assad? Is there even a term in the lexicon of human rights to describe what he's doing to an entire country?